Trump Bump: Good for Money, but Bad for Journalism
Publishers want the money that comes from a Trump bump. Chasing that money may not actually be the best choice.
Since Donald Trump announced first campaign in June 2015, he has been a paradox: the media industry’s most valuable asset and its greatest antagonist. As we head into his second term, publishers will have to grapple with whether they embark on the slippery slope of adversity or refocus on making their newsrooms great again.
Consider the following two stories published this week. First, Axios reported that there has been no Trump Bump since he won the election.
The news media industry is on pins and needles waiting to see whether Trump 2.0 will bring engagement on anything approaching the level of his first term. The early signs are ominous.
Web traffic to major news websites saw a pronounced decline in December, according to data from Similarweb. Publishers, including CNN and the Washington Post, saw double-digit percentage declines in December compared to October.
People are exhausted with all the political coverage. Everywhere they turn, it’s the same story. That can be a real drain—especially for people who feel like they lost. Left-leaning readers spent all of 2024 reading a ton of political coverage and what good did it do for them? Trump still won. As Axios reports, “major U.S. news websites grew web traffic by roughly 10% year over year.”
Now the election is over, the declines are coming for a very good reason. Axios follows up by saying:
Polling helps to explain why readers changed the channel post-election: Two-thirds of Americans said they felt the need to dial down political news consumption, according to a December AP-NORC survey.
But then there’s CNN, which reported that there has been a Trump Bump for The Guardian—just not in traffic.
After Trump remarked that “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” The Guardian blasted out a defiant fundraising email stating, “Trump, we don’t want to be your friend” and urging readers to contribute a year-end gift.
Emails like that one apparently worked. On Tuesday, The Guardian US said the outlet’s end-of-2024 fundraising campaign raised $5.13 million in immediate contributions, more than double the previous record $2.2 million it brought in at the end of 2023.
So, traffic isn’t rising; however, The Guardian is finding that it’s generating more reader revenue than it had if Trump lost the election—the $2.2 million from end of 2023 proves it. The readers didn’t have an incentive to donate nearly as much as at the end of 2024.
After the Washington Post decided not to issue an endorsement, multiple brands used that for marketing. The Atlantic was one of them. According to Nieman Lab:
The Atlantic, which reminded readers it endorsed Harris earlier this month in an email blast, has seen “strong” conversion numbers from both the endorsement and ongoing election-related subscription campaign, a spokesperson said.
The New York Times reported in December that The Atlantic “beefs up politics coverage under Trump.” This little tidbit jumped out to me:
In March, the company announced that it had crossed one million subscribers and had become profitable, a major milestone. The organization has added roughly 100,000 subscribers since then, one of the people said…
If you read the full Nieman Lab story, you’ll see there are many publications that have benefited. But this desire to be adversarial comes with risks. You may not pull as hard on a certain thread because it could “help Trump.”
A great example of this is discussed in this op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle about the failure of the press to report on President Biden’s fitness. As the author, the former dean of a journalism school, writes:
Not since 2003, when the country’s top media bought the Bush administration’s fiction that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons and enabled a catastrophic war, would journalists have failed in their principal duty to the public with such consequence.
I agree. So many reporters became obsessed with fighting Trump that they forgot what their job was. Their executives were more interested in taglines like “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and growing subscriptions that they didn’t go after the obvious: Joe Biden was not fit to be President in the latter half of his term.
As the op-ed writer stated:
Understandably, the story of a president in decline isn’t an easy one to get. Those in the best position to know are the least inclined to say. Reporters are ever mindful that the people who would be most furious to read about it control access to matters of greatest significance to their jobs.
But, wait, the media weren’t deterred under Biden’s predecessor. The spate of harsh and critical coverage of the Trump White House suggested a press corps eager and fully able to report with rich detail about a chief executive who was unfit for office.
In hindsight, making this the most important story might have changed the course of the election.
And so, media companies have a choice. They can take the easy way out and lean into continued coverage that will give them a “Trump Bump.” Or they can attempt to get back to doing their jobs. The Washington Post’s new mission of “riveting storytelling for all of America” is kind of hokey, but it’s the right approach, even if it doesn’t have a clear audience in mind.
When it comes down to covering politics and government, the best way for the media to do its job is to recognize that their job isn’t to tell voters what to do, but instead, to inform them. What we operators will need to figure out is how to monetize that. But view the Washington Post as a cautionary tale: it lost $100 million last year despite being a part of the resistance. That’s not the path to success.
